For­eign desk: Rus­sia’s Last Czar Still Hasn’t Found Peace

Rus­sia’s relationship with its his­tory is be­ing haunted by the re­mains of Ni­cholas II, its last czar and “the vic­tim of Vlad­mir Lenin’s dic­ta­to­rial regime,” says Maxim Tru­dolyubov at The Rus­sia File. Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin re­port­edly “would like to or­ga­nize a sym­bolic cer­e­mony that would bring closure to Rus­sia’s di­vi­sive and bloody twen­ti­eth cen­tury” with re­burial of the last two mem­bers of the royal fam­ily. But the Rus­sian Or­tho­dox Church, “Putin’s main do­mes­tic po­lit­i­cal ally,” re­fuses to rec­og­nize the re­mains. That’s block­ing a rec­on­cil­i­a­tion be­tween mod­ern Rus­sians and an “op­pres­sive state that once wanted ev­ery­one to march into the fu­ture by shed­ding the shack­les of re­li­gious be­lief and now wants ev­ery­one to stride back into the past by putting on the heavy gar­ments of the old faith of the fathers.”